


Albatross

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Fix-It, M/M, Plane Crash, Post-Movie, beach feelings, moderate gore, ole smokey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-12
Updated: 2012-11-12
Packaged: 2017-11-18 11:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/560598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[TSN/Lost fusion.] Two years after the lawsuit ends, Mark and Eduardo are both flying on Oceanic Airways Flight 815 when it crashes on a mysterious tropical island. A story about starting over, surviving together and finding one another along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Albatross

**Author's Note:**

> For TSN Big Bang 2012. Thanks to M & J for the indispensable beta work.
> 
> Notes on the AU-ness: This is fusion mostly in that it treats Mark and Eduardo as two of those background characters who never die but never have screentime either, and actual Lost characters make only minor appearances. I generally followed the season 1 timeline, meaning that if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not supposed to!
> 
> More notes and art at [LJ](http://forsanethaec.livejournal.com/75787.html).

The first thing Mark realizes with coherency is that he’s lying on the back, in hot sand. The second thing is that there’s a roaring in his ears, and the third thing is that the bright blue sky overhead is torn apart by a gash of black smoke, billowing upwards from somewhere close by on the ground. 

The fourth thing is that he’s in a shocking amount of pain. His leg feels like it’s pulsing through with electricity, numb and indistinct but somehow brilliantly clear at the same time. He hears himself make a noise, a weak, alien kind of wail that comes out of its own accord, and he tries to sit up but he can’t and he drops back into the sand, breathing in short, tight bursts. 

There’s something weighing him down, crushing his leg to the ground. His vision swims with black spots as he tries again to sit up to see. 

A piece of metal? 

With half of an Oceanic Airways logo visible on the side–

“Mark!” 

He turns his head. Someone is running toward him, sand kicking up around his dress shoes like the wake of a boat. 

Mark becomes aware then that there’s sound everywhere, people screaming for help, screaming for each other, just screaming. He stares upward. His heart is beating so rapidly he feels like he’s going to die, each tachycardic pump of blood in his chest sending a surge of pain through his body, trembling violently, into his leg.

All of a sudden there’s a deafening boom somewhere to his left, the point of origin of the smoke. The shock of the explosion hits him in a wave of heat, tiny bits of debris stinging his face, and he jolts with it, covering his head. It was the engine of the plane going up. 

_The engine of the plane._

An animal noise rips through the air from that same direction and Mark turns back, squinting against the heat of the newly blazing fire a little ways off, to see a man in a pink polo shirt dragging himself desperately away from it, his khakis blood-soaked, shockingly red and wet, and one leg just – gone, from the knee down. Mark turns his face away again, and then he turns all the way to the other side and vomits into the sand, weak and messy. There doesn’t seem to be much in his stomach – maybe he already threw up. He’s shaking so badly he can barely lift his hand to wipe his mouth. 

The man who’s been running toward him had fallen when the engine blew, but he pulls himself up from where he was lying in a heap a little ways off and tumbles, legs wheeling in the sand, to Mark’s side. 

“Jesus,” the guy says, hands uncertain over where Mark is pinned by the piece of the hull, and Mark looks up into his face. It’s Eduardo Saverin. 

He takes this fact about as rationally as he’s taking any of the rest of this, that is to say, with shock and confusion so great that they cross some invisible line in his brain and become dazed acceptance, the kind where he’s thinking, _well, this is literally all fucked, so I’ll figure out if it’s real later._

“Can you feel it?” Eduardo asks him now. His voice is wild with stress, not yelling precisely but urgent and panicked. Mark nods. 

“What happened?” he hears himself ask. His voice does not seem to belong to him.

“The plane – you’re bleeding, I have to – I don’t know what to do.” Eduardo is shaking as badly as Mark, his face pale and mottled with fear, and Mark thinks, helplessly, almost comically, of blotchy cheeks and a gash of a screaming mouth and a laptop smashing on a desk, a million miles from here and yet somehow as close as the mingled sounds of his own and Eduardo’s labored breaths. 

Eduardo places his hands on the frame of the piece of metal on – in? – Mark’s leg and Mark hisses. 

“Okay, okay,” Eduardo stammers, “try to relax,” and he steadies his hands against it and then turns to Mark again.

“This is going to hurt,” he says.

“Are you sure you should–” but the words die in Mark’s throat as Eduardo yanks up on the torn piece of plane, pulling it clean out of Mark’s leg. The pain is so incredible that it rips through Mark like he’s being electrocuted for all of one second before hitting a wall of shock that whites it out, fading it into a dull, pulsing buzz. 

Mark tries to look for a fleeting moment. It's a bad idea. The shrapnel had been in pretty deep, and while it doesn’t seem to have severed anything permanently, he can see – a lot of bad things, unidentifiable stuff, a meaty mess of muscle, blood everywhere, nothing in the right place. There don’t appear to any bits of bone poking out, but he can’t imagine it hasn’t fractured his tibia. He squeezes his eyes shut against the wave of nausea that threatens to knock him out and drops his head back again.

“Don’t look,” Eduardo tells him helpfully, once Mark’s already done so. He’s using the bloody edge of the offending piece of shrapnel to saw off a strip of fabric from his own dress shirt.

“Hold still,” he says, and his voice is so soft amid all this deafening chaos that it makes Mark hurt all over, a different kind of hurt. Eduardo is – here. With him. Eduardo was on the plane, and the plane crashed, and they’re here together. It hits him in another wave, and the feeling is almost a comfort, because he knows this kind of pain. It’s familiar to him. It rears up like muscle memory.

Mark breathes shallowly as Eduardo ties the strip of shirt in a makeshift tourniquet above the place where his leg is mangled, then tears off half of one of his sleeves, too, and wraps it around the bleeding area in a bandage. It fucking hurts like a bitch. He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling faint, still.

It’s only when it’s done that he notices that he’s clutching Eduardo’s hand so tightly he can’t feel his own fingers anymore. Eduardo is watching him, eyes round and face drained of color. 

They stay frozen like that, anchored together by fear and confusion and each other and not knowing what to do next, trying to tamp down their shaking and slow their breathing. 

Mark doesn’t know how much time passes (probably not much, but minutes have rather lost meaning) before another guy, suit jacket and close-cropped black hair, older than the two of them, comes tearing up the beach and skids to a halt in their space. It bursts the little bubble of quiet, singular focus on _Eduardo?_ that Mark hadn’t realized was keeping the terror still reigning outside out. He blames the pain for the distraction, and lets go of Eduardo’s hand, flexing his stiff fingers.

The guy drops to his knees next to them, eyes trained on Mark’s leg like he knows what he’s looking for. He lays his hands on it, lightly, and Mark hisses with pain. 

“What happened?” he asks, out of breath.

“A piece of the plane—” Mark says, and Eduardo finishes over him, “—on it.”

“You guys need to get out of here,” the guy pants, “the wing–”

Mark looks up. The torn remnants of the plane’s right wing are creaking menacingly right over them, bobbing slightly in the air like a diving board. 

“Eduardo, we’ve gotta move,” he breathes. 

“Get him up the beach,” the guy – he must be a doctor or something – says to Eduardo, staggering to his feet and pointing, “keep weight off that leg, we’ll set the fracture later–” he swears under his breath, and Mark can see blood blooming on his side across his white shirt beneath his suit jacket, and he stares – “then can you come help me?” Eduardo nods immediately, eyes wide. “Okay,” the guy says, “go, go!” and he moves off from them at a run, in the direction of the burning fuselage where the engine had exploded. 

“Wait!” Eduardo yells after him. “What’s your name?”

The guy half-stumbles as he turns back. “Jack!” 

Eduardo gets his arms under Mark’s armpits. “Can you stand,” he says, “come on, you can do it, Mark, come on,” and he hauls him upright. “You’ve got one good leg, you can stand up, come on.” 

Studiously avoiding looking at his leg, Mark bends his knee on his other leg and braces himself against Eduardo, exhaling, trying to steady. “Okay,” he says. His voice sounds stronger, and he tightens his hold around Eduardo, leaning into his body. 

“Up,” Eduardo says, and he gets on his feet and pulls. Mark feels like his leg is splintering into a million pieces down the shin when he puts weight on it by accident for one second and he bites down around a cry of pain. He wheels away from where he’d been lying – blood on the sand and the shadow of the broken wing overhead just beyond – and hops on his good leg with Eduardo as a crutch up the beach, stumbling in the sand when they try to go too fast.

He looks back just as the wing splinters at its joints and falls, with a thunderous, screeching crash of metal. There’s no explosion, but it would have crushed them. He can’t see whether anyone else was in its way. 

Eduardo drops him in the sand close to the tree line.

“You’re okay,” he says, sounding like he’s saying it to himself as much as Mark. “I have to–”

“Go,” Mark grunts, hunching over the makeshift tourniquet and squeezing his whole body inward against the renewed rush of agony, singing through his nerves. “I’m not fucking going anywhere,” he adds when Eduardo dithers, an absurd picture, his skinny frame in his ripped-up clothes and his dress shoes scuffed with sand.

“Okay,” Eduardo says, voice wavering, and he runs off. 

Mark stares at the beach strewn with wreckage, bodies... pieces of bodies – and people standing around or huddled in clumps or running back and forth, everyone with that same wide-eyed look paralyzing disbelief. 

In his head, Mark tries to write a program to determine the probability of an over-ocean plane crash on a flight like Sydney-LA. But it has to be mathy, and even once he’s sketched out the skeleton of the formula, he doesn’t know the right numbers to fill in. A million. Two. Ten million, to one.

assume(lambda > 0);  
T := [[t -> lambda, t -> lambda * t],  
[0, 1, infinity],  
[“Discrete”, “HF”]];

It’s usually easy to distract himself with mental coding, but he’s overshot it. Actually, what he needs is an algorithm. _I always fucking need an algorithm_ , he thinks deliriously, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, harder and harder until lights pop on the black of his eyelids. 

When he opens them, the program has evaporated in its imagined input field, and he has to look at the beach again. 

Things seem to be calming just slightly now, the major follow-up disasters (the explosion of the engine, the falling wing) past. The people who need help appear, for the most part, either to have died or to be receiving it. 

“The plane crashed,” Mark murmurs to himself, stilted, trying to force the words to gain some purchase on reality. It doesn’t really work. He swallows hard, throat cracking dry, and tries not to look at his leg.

Eduardo is down by the source of most of the smoke now, helping the so-called Jack move the guy with the missing leg away from the fire, which is tailing down as people throw sand on it using open suitcases. Missing leg guy looks like he’s passed out, and Mark wonders kind of detachedly whether he’s dead. Probably not; if that was the case, they wouldn’t be wasting time on him.

 

Mark doesn’t remember the moment of impact, but he doesn’t remember blacking out during the crash, either, so there’s a discrepancy somewhere. The others are making a lot of noise about _how_ and _where_ , clumped around the wrecked beach in the gathering dusk; Mark remembers turbulence, and it’s satisfying for him, fits into gap of logic in his brain labeled “plane crash.” He doesn’t trust planes – never _trusted_ planes. Weird, how quickly that gets into past tense.

He’s focusing on the details (how there is sand _everywhere_ , how the smell of burning fuel and the underlying acridity of things far more horrible burning too is fading finally from the air) in order to distract from the larger realities: the crash, his mangled leg, and the fact that a lot of people are dead. But not everyone. Not him. 

They’ve been on this random island somewhere between Sydney and Los Angeles for going on six hours now and they haven’t been rescued and they’re just – improvising. 

And Eduardo’s here, too, sitting next to him on the beach all haunted in his torn-up dress shirt and slacks, but that’s a hilarity Mark hasn’t quite fully contemplated yet.

The guy up front – the doctor, Jack – is saying something about dividing the labor, scavenging the wreckage for food, water, medicine, getting kindling for a signal fire. Mark stops listening. He isn’t going to be useful for anything with his leg like this, and there’s a block that gets thrown up in his mind at the thought of whatever comes next. Possibly his way of handling terror and shock so consuming that even regimenting or the uncertainty of salvation overwhelms him. He looks toward the tree line, at the back of the stripe of low greenery and tangled bushes that caps off the beach. The sand bleeds through the shadowy spaces between the palms and scrubby pines like the tide.

“Mark.”

Eduardo’s voice is a different kind of startling, cutting in. It would feel out of place under the best of circumstances.

“Yeah,” he says, turning back. The edgy look of concern on Eduardo’s face is utterly familiar. The others are already fanning out, weaving lost and aimless, and a few glance back at the pair of them. They must make for a confusing little coupling, together at the top of the beach in the presence of so much loss and isolation.

“Hey, I’m going to, to.” Eduardo gestures abortively behind him, toward the sea and the snake-line of wreckage along its edge.

“Yeah,” Mark says. “Yeah, I’ll be here.”

Eduardo stands and brushes the sand off his pants with the backs of his hands. This strikes Mark as absurdly funny, but he doesn’t laugh. Instead he says, “You keeping your shoes on?”

Eduardo looks down at them. Black dress shoes, half-sunk into the sand. They’d been shiny on the plane.

“I don’t know,” he says fretfully. “I thought there might be – shrapnel.” The word comes out scripted, something necessarily fake. Mark shrugs.

“I’ll be back soon,” Eduardo says, and Mark grimaces. He looks up. Eduardo’s dirty face is growing indistinct against the deep blue twilight.

“Okay,” he prompts after a moment.

“Okay.” Eduardo turns slowly on the spot, orienting himself toward a cluster of people digging through luggage. He stomps away in his sand-filled shoes.

Mark looks down at his leg. It hurts in peaks, fading in and out of the neurological white noise trying to keep him from feeling it. He knows he’s fucked up under Eduardo’s makeshift bandage. But the bleeding stopped a while ago, even after they took the tourniquet off, so it’s probably the best he’s going to do. Better than some other people. 

He’s flopped down in the sand by the time Eduardo gets back, waiting to see the precise moment when the stars make their first appearance. It’s amazing the kind of shit you can get up to when you literally have not one single thing to do. He can’t even think, which would normally be a given – there’s something very tangible still present in his brain, a wall of grey fog that says _stop, you’re better off without this_ every time he tries to probe through it.

“They’re still staring,” he comments when Eduardo sinks down next to him, carrying two bags of chips, a half-full bottle of water with an Oceanic Airlines label and a torch made from a piece of driftwood. “Because it’s weird that we know each other.” 

Eduardo laughs, one hollow syllable, like looking into your cupped hands. “No,” he says, taut and charitably patient, “it’s because you’re you.” He stabs the torch into the sand between them with a crunch. Mark looks away. 

“I’m not a celebrity.”

That laugh again. “Whatever, Mark.”

“It _is_ weird that we know each other, though.” It comes out more childish than he intends.

“I guess.”

“Everyone else is just – alone.”

“Some of them, yeah.” Eduardo looks over at him, face drawn in that way that always means something different than what it should. Eduardo’s always thinking – Eduardo always thought, always had some other thought about Mark, what Mark was saying, about the two of them. Mark can only really read him as far as where it traces back to himself. Beyond that, it isn’t worth trying.

“Here,” Eduardo says finally, proffering the water and one of the bags of chips. Mark takes them. His head is feeling a little clearer now that Eduardo’s here. Improbably, his presence is the easiest part of their situation to accept. 

“How was the scavenging?” he asks, unscrewing the bottle.

“There isn’t much more food,” Eduardo says. “They’re divvying it up. They were looking for antibiotics and stuff like that, but there isn’t much.”

Mark gulps down half of the water and hands it back to Eduardo.

“Thanks,” Eduardo says, flashing the ghost of a smile in Mark’s direction.

“There’s probably food in the jungle,” Mark says, more for the sake of saying it than because he actually believes it. “Fruit or whatever.”

“Some people were talking about it, but, I mean. It’s sort of – no one’s really – there’s no way we’ll be here that long.”

“Right.”

The beach is riotous with crickets and tree frogs in the jungle, the rustle of leaves, the rhythmic crashing of the waves. Eduardo is looking at him again. He says, “Mark,” so quietly it almost seems imagined, but it isn’t.

“So, I,” Mark says, jerky, “how have you been?”

Eduardo raises an eyebrow.

“How have I _been_?”

“It’s just been a long time since–” Mark shrugs. “I’m just asking, Wardo.” The name feels impossibly foreign in his mouth, and he half regrets saying it.

“Yeah,” Eduardo bites out. He exhales in a whoosh, tipping his head back, the arch of his long neck sweat-smudged with whatever the dirty things are they all have smeared all over themselves. 

“I’ve been fine,” he says finally, with some effort.

“I can go somewhere else,” Mark says flatly, “if that’s what you–” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eduardo snaps. 

Mark closes his mouth.

Then he says, “Look,” trying to soften his tone and mostly failing, “I don’t – we shouldn’t have to deal with this on top of everything.”

“Well, we do,” Eduardo says shortly, but it’s lacking more in bile than he had been a moment ago. He’s not looking at Mark.

“It’s just –” he starts, and then he shakes his head, mouth twisting mirthlessly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Eduardo doesn’t look at him, and Mark wonders if he’s thinking now about the last time they saw each other, too, glass-walled conference room and hollow stares. It’s been two years. 

There’s silence for a moment. The waves rush in.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Eduardo says finally. “I don’t want to pretend I – but – yeah.”

“I’m sure before we’d have said we’d rather be trapped alone than together. But obviously that’s absurd, now.”

Eduardo runs the heels of his hands hard over his eyes. “Yeah, it is.”

Mark waits, but nothing else appears to be forthcoming. He breathes out very quietly.

“You’d think they would have come by now,” Eduardo says after a while. He’s looking out at the horizon.

“What?” Mark says. “Who?”

“Anyone.” 

They both look down the beach to where the signal fire is roaring skyward, sending sparks dancing into the dark. The ocean is black now; it’s been probably eight hours, and there’s a dazed, suppressed terror hanging heavy over everything, and Mark wonders absently if he’s really blocking it out as much as he thinks, or if he’s just handling it weirdly well. He glances over the anxious lines of Eduardo’s expression.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says, just because he can say it, nothing more. Eduardo looks at him, and there’s an odd pinch to his face, a drawing-together of his eyebrows that Mark can’t place. 

After a few seconds of apparent dithering, Eduardo just says, “Thanks.” It’s tender – that’s the only word Mark can think of for it – and Eduardo clearly hadn’t meant for it to be. He looks away again, too quickly.

Something huge crashes in the jungle. It echoes into the night, and they both whip around. It sounded like a tree falling, except... wrong. Mark feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up. 

“What was that?” Eduardo whispers. 

Mark shakes his head, staring into the darkness of the trees beyond the edge of the sand. The leafy canopy, spread out like a carpet before the far-off mountain peaks that form the center of the island, is illuminated dimly by stars and moonlight, still but for the rustling of the wind. 

They wait, frozen. Every nerve in Mark’s body is alight with adrenaline. It’s an incredibly unpleasant feeling to have again so soon after the immediate aftermath of the crash. 

_Scared_. The word blinks across his mind, clinical, an ID tag. 

“Mark,” Eduardo says, barely above a whisper. He’s frozen, half-twisted where he sits in the sand a few feet away. The scattered murmur of quiet conversations across the beach has evaporated in the space of an instant. 

Mark grabs their burning branch from the sand and holds it aloft ineffectually. The rest of the survivors have gathered in a ragged line stretching out on either side of them, the same questions being repeated urgently all around, everyone’s shoulders brushing. 

“An animal?” Eduardo tries, voice faint, “or – a tree, or...”

“Didn’t sound like it,” Mark says carefully. His knuckles are white around the driftwood torch.

The crash comes again, to the right of where it was originally, and a few palm trees suddenly fall out of sight in the same spot with a shuddering crunch of wood. Mark can’t blink. He can’t move. Then again, back to the left, a blade-like swoop that doesn’t belong anywhere near nature. This time it’s followed by a series of clicks, a whirring noise, almost, and a chugging kind of sound like a drain coughing up water. 

Another crash in the middle of the valley, and more trees fall. Then one, long, keening note, an echoing trumpet call, but it’s not a trumpet. The sound sends a chill of incomprehension straight through Mark’s chest, and it rings in his ears even as it seems to move off.

After another few seconds of petrified staring, he regains control of his muscles and turns, wide-eyed, to Eduardo. The torch is dripping fire onto the sand. 

“Mark,” Eduardo says, low and urgent, “where are we?”

 

Mark doesn’t know when they all finally fall asleep, but he wakes with the first peek of sunrise over the open ocean the next day, the morning air thin and cool. He’s curled into the sand like a crab, digging out a trench with his part-useless body. His leg still hurts, dully, throbbing weakly. He’s surprised he slept through it. 

Eduardo is near to him, close in a helpless kind of way, like he thought it would be stupider to sleep apart from Mark than beside him, stretched out all long tattered limbs and dirt-smudged angles on the slope of the beach where it just starts to become the jungle. They’d moved a little further away, closer into the main group, last night after that – whatever it was, that weird machine noise had crashed through deeper in. Mark gets a little chill down his arms thinking of it, and he shakes his head to clear the static. 

He looks at Eduardo for a while, the serenity on his face patently out of place with their situation, and then looks out at the ocean. It’s a flat line, blue like nothing he’s ever seen before that wasn’t fake, like a travel brochure. It must be the Indian, but no, they’d been flying a long enough time before the turbulence hit that they would have passed out of the general area of Australia. The South Pacific, then. Maybe close to Hawaii, or Fiji, or anywhere in between.

But of course, this island wouldn’t have a name even if he did know where they were. He thinks if it was inhabited that the natives would have come running out of the jungle by now – it’s been probably 18 hours. 

Eighteen hours, and the horizon is entirely clear.

A ways down the beach, several of the survivors are still awake, hunched around the signal fire they’d built last night. The huge blaze seems fake against the brightening sky. Fire never looks right in the daytime, but Mark supposes the smoke and the flames will do double duty getting the attention of potential rescuers now that it’s light out. 

Eduardo stirs next to him but doesn’t wake, and Mark feels a little squeeze in his chest, that starkly different kind of pain than the one in his leg. He considers, for a moment, which he’d rather focus on. The leg wins.

He bends over it, feeling the stretch up the back of his skinny thigh, and examines the area around Eduardo’s bandage. It’s purpled with swelling, but when he touches the skin it’s only tender, not overly hot or stiff, so he thinks that must be a good thing. 

He bites into the side of his tongue to keep from making noise as he starts to undo the wrapping gingerly, but can’t stop a hiss from snaking between his lips, and he looks compulsively at Eduardo. He doesn’t know why he worried, though. Eduardo sleeps like the dead. 

Underneath, the wound is as messy as yesterday, but the bleeding seems to have stopped, all soaked up into the bandage. They should set it with something, a splint, or whatever one does, but he is entirely incapable of getting this together on his own. It’s kind of horrifying, actually, to be so impotent and vulnerable in a situation like this. He couldn’t even swim off this island if he wanted to. Or run from whatever is in the jungle.

Helplessly, like a tic of the eyes toward a muted television in the background of a more important conversation, his focus slides back to Eduardo, still asleep with his fingers buried in the sand. 

He hadn’t known Eduardo was on his flight; at least, he can’t remember seeing him. He’s not sure whether Eduardo saw him. He wonders what he was doing in Australia; plots, mentally, the trajectory from Singapore to Sydney, from Sydney to LA to Palo Alto. And here they are, thrown back together, somewhere in between it all. 

“Wardo,” he says softly. He can’t help it. He wants Eduardo wake up so he can stop being alone. 

Eduardo’s face flickers, and he blinks awake sleepily, curling into himself with his face scrunched up for a moment in a five-more-minutes-mom kind of gesture.

“What?” he yawns. 

Mark just looks down at him, and finally Eduardo sits up, rubbing his eyes like a sleepy child. He squints out at the ocean, and then squints at Mark.

 _Mark_. He mouths the name, and Mark wonders if he’d forgotten, in that netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, where they were. “What?” he says again. 

“I wanted you to wake up,” Mark says. 

This earns him a little duck of Eduardo’s mouth, and Mark knows that face, and it’s been so many years since he’s seen it. All at once, it’s a great, aching comfort – a reminder of a reality Mark had long since forgotten to even think of as reality, but it was, once, and it’s worlds more real than the present. 

“How’s your leg,” Eduardo says, eyes flicking to it. 

Mark shrugs. “Okay, I think. I was going to change the bandage.” 

“You want my other sleeve?” Eduardo says drily.

“Are you offering?”

Eduardo twists his mouth at him. “Sure.” He finds a tear in his unadulterated sleeve and hooks his finger into it, tugging until the fabric rips. He hands Mark the resulting strip, then rolls up the ripped ends of both sleeves neatly around his thin biceps so that he could be wearing a collared T-shirt. 

“You look fine,” Mark tells him, rolling his eyes. He wraps the new piece of fabric around his leg with some difficulty, gritting his teeth so hard that he feels it in his temples. 

“Does it hurt?” Eduardo asks, in what Mark thinks is a rather rudely dispassionate voice.

He raises his eyebrows. “No,” he says, rounding the syllable sardonically. 

Eduardo actually laughs, and it’s genuine, catching them both by surprise. Mark looks down at his leg so he won’t have to meet Eduardo’s gaze. 

It’s another 20 minutes, maybe – an interval they spend quietly catching one another’s eyes in passing on the way to staring out at the ocean or up at the sky – before the rest of the beach appears to start to wake up, too, and Eduardo dutifully gets up to gather with the rest of the survivors and find out what, if anything, is going on. Mark watches him traipse off, feeling edgy. He shifts in the sand, wanting to feel like he’s moving, and then lays back and stares at the undersides of the palms that edge the beach, just visible up behind him. 

When he next opens his eyes, it’s to find Eduardo kneeling beside him. The sight ticks at the memory of the crash inside him and he flinches away, sitting up.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“Apparently,” Mark grumbles. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Eduardo says. “I got breakfast –” he holds out an airline dinner, and Mark half-smirks – “and, I don’t know. They’re talking about going to look for the cockpit in the jungle. Find the radio, maybe the pilot,” and their eyes meet and Mark can feel them silently agree – how could anything have survived crashing inside the plane into that jungle, and survived the night on top of that?

“A lot of these people are way more up for adventure than I am,” Eduardo says. It makes Mark smile, and he’s not sure why. “I found our luggage, though.”

“Mine?”

“It was the one with the Facebook logo on it,” he says, and however hard he’s working to restrain himself, he still spits the word. Mark averts his eyes. 

“Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says heavily. The air has gone out between the two of them like a sagging balloon, and Mark wants to say something but he has no idea what.

“I mean,” he says, “for everything,” and Eduardo looks up, frowning.

“What?”

“For my leg, and. Yeah.” Mark’s fingers twitch, itching to be shoved into a hoodie pocket that doesn’t exist. He’s in a T-shirt and what’s left of his jeans. His flip-flops are nowhere to be found – he supposes they got left in the wreckage. 

“Yeah,” Eduardo says in a strange sort of voice. He drags Mark’s suitcase over to him, its wheels tugging reluctantly through the sand. Mark rests his hand on it, and he feels dizzy suddenly, head spinning. He closes his eyes.

Eduardo notices. Of course he does.

“You okay?” he asks.

Mark swallows. “It’s just weird,” he says, “to have something familiar.”

Eduardo lets his breath out in a low whoosh. “It is.”

They go through their stuff. Mark’s laptop was on his tray table when the turbulence hit and is God knows where now. 

He finds a pair of sneakers among his clothes, though it seems stupid to put them on. Eduardo only has dress shoes – typical – so he gives them to him. His sandals are probably somewhere on the beach. They’ll find them eventually. 

Eduardo finds a white V-neck in his bag, and Mark tries to avert his eyes while he changes but ends up not being able to. Eduardo is ridiculously tan to begin with, and already the abundance of sun in this place is showing on his golden skin. 

Mark thinks a lot of vague, half-formed things, about not denying himself simple pleasures in times of stress, about how long it’s been since he was even on the same continent as Eduardo’s body, let alone two feet from it, the planes of his back and the shadow-rails of his ribs as he moves, but by the time he’s even halfway to parsing any of it Eduardo’s finished, anyway. 

He thinks Eduardo probably notices him watching, but neither of them says anything. 

 

He won’t remember later, but Mark does spot Eduardo on the plane before it goes down, after the turbulence starts and just before the first overhead bin springs open and unleashes a carry-on into someone’s skull. 

It would be impossible not to recognize the back of his head and the visible sliver of the side of his profile, three rows up and across the aisle in first class: cheeks filled out slightly in the intervening years (grown up some, and weight gained back from the lawsuit period, which Mark knows via Chris that Eduardo had spent under-eating due to stress) and hair still cleanly coiffed and over-stiffly done, such a familiar sight from the depositions alone. He’s reading a magazine – _Fortune 500_ , Mark’s brain supplies unbidden, it’s the most likely option. Eduardo was always reading Fortune 500, because his father bought him the subscription. Dustin used to cut out letters from the old issues to make ransom notes with which to menace people on their floor who borrowed his DVDs for too long. 

Mark thinks all of this, thinks, _Eduardo is on my flight_ , and his arms go stiff like he wants to get up and, like, walk away, or go up and talk to him, say the wrong thing. An aimlessly conditioned response. 

The plane shudders, once. Two seconds pass, and then it shudders again, a sudden sort of jump that swoops in Mark’s stomach and makes his heart skip a little on instinct. He’s in the window seat, but there’s no one next to him. He puts down the middle armrest. 

He is not a nervous flier. He still has not taken his eyes off Eduardo. 

_Don’t turn around_ , he thinks.

There’s a ding, and the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign illuminates, right next to ‘no smoking’ and ‘flotation device under seat.’

The plane shudders again, and then, for a full second, dead drops. Mark’s body lifts with the freefall. People shriek. He tightens his seat belt and shuts the lid of his computer atop the tray table and presses himself back into his seat, and he still, still cannot stop looking at Eduardo. His fingers are white-knuckled against the armrests, and the roar of the engines is filling his ears and he thinks, unbidden, of disaster odds, of the scattered clouds outside the porthole windows, of Eduardo. 

There’s a side-to-side shake, like the plane is trying to throw someone off. Mark can hear the wings rattling. 

Eduardo has his magazine rolled up in one tense fist, crumpled against the side of his armrest.

He looks around, head turning jerkily, stuck stiff with nerves, and then for just a second he looks back. His eyes meet Mark’s and Mark sees them widen, sees the color climb into Eduardo’s cheeks. 

Mark should nod, should do something, say something, but all he can do is stare.

The pilot is saying something over the intercom. Mark can’t hear anything but the rushing in his ears, the frightened buzz of whimpering passengers, tight, uncertain reassurances, and Eduardo’s eyes haven’t left his. 

Then the plane slams downward, and the bin right in front of him bursts open. A suitcase flies out, straight into the head of the guy across the aisle from Eduardo. There’s a spurt of blood. Screams, everywhere, and a high whining noise, and the plane is plummeting, he can feel it, and everything is shaking so violently that he can’t see Eduardo anymore, and then the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling. 

Then, with a colossal rending of metal and wind, the back half of the plane breaks off. Mark does not know how he knows this, but he does. He hasn’t blinked, his fingers so tight around the ends of the armrests that he can’t feel them, can’t feel his body, can’t move. 

With an enormous effort, he manages to lift his hands against the force of their acceleration to pull his oxygen mask over his face, brace his knees against the seat in front of him, and after that he doesn’t remember anything else, not Eduardo’s face or the plane dropping out of the sky or the cerulean blue of the ocean, rushing up to meet them.

 

There’s no rescue on the second day, either. 

The island is a beautiful place, the lush, shocking hues of the jungle and the ocean and the air so clear that each breath feels bright and expansive in his lungs. Mark can appreciate all of this in an observational way, detached, because it still doesn’t feel real, and he doesn’t know what it’s going to take to change that. 

With Eduardo’s help, he drags himself out of the shade into the middle of the beach so he can look up at the mountain and the jungle valley stretching out for probably miles past the beach. He can’t remember seeing the island while they were flying in, so it’s tough to gauge how big it is or what shape the shoreline takes. It snakes off out of sight in a curve on either side. The mountain in the middle has two or three jagged, jungle-covered peaks, crags of black rock peeking out at random. There’s no readily apparent inland water – a lake, maybe, or a river – but Eduardo says the people going to look for the pilot will see what they can find.

Eduardo is puttering around a lot, helping other people do random other things – sort through luggage, move wreckage, tend to the injured – but he keeps gravitating back toward Mark. It’s funny, if not very surprising. He thinks Eduardo would probably be orbiting around him in this situation even if he’d never done so before. It is, it seems, just the kind of thing one does after a plane crash. 

Mark, for his part, is spared the necessity of failing to want to make friends by his leg. Jack came over and splinted it in the late morning, and stitched up the wound as best he could. It was not, Mark could tell, an easy wound to tend to beyond just letting it be on its own. 

Jack had offered him painkillers, something low-grade and over-the-counter that they’d found in the luggage, but Mark had waved them off. 

“Other people need them more than me,” he’d said, and he’d tried to ignore the misty look Eduardo gave him out of the corner of his eye. 

Eventually Mark rotates so he can squint out at the deserted ocean. There’s so much horizon visible that he can make out the slight, frail curve of the earth.

An hour or two later, he’s still posted up in exactly the same position when something steps into his light.

“Here.”

Eduardo is standing over him, backlit, holding out a tube of something. “Use it,” he says imperiously. Mark takes it and turns it over in his hand.

“SPF 70,” he comments dryly. “I didn’t even know they made SPF 70.” He looks up, his brows flat over his eyes and knotted against the sun.

“Someone else on the plane was clearly as blindingly white as you are,” Eduardo says.

“Jesus,” Mark says after a moment of staring in which Eduardo fails to burst out laughing and go, April Fool’s. “I’m not wearing sunblock, Wardo, I think we have bigger things–”

“You’re literally going to burst into flames,” Eduardo says, dropping down onto his haunches so that he’s on Mark’s eye level. “I’m serious. You’ll turn into a tomato and die.”

“Yes, that is how science works, after all.”

“If you don’t want to wear it then you have to go back in the shade,” Eduardo says. Mark rolls his eyes.

“You are the motheringest – mother – person,” he states clearly, “ever. You’re embarrassing.”

“I’m aware,” Eduardo says. “Put it on.”

Mark glares a moment longer, but he does it, only because he thinks Eduardo might try to do it for him if he doesn’t and that is not happening.

He can already feel that he’s burned within another few hours, even after putting on the sunblock. He watches Eduardo setting up a little campsite, airplane blankets, extra firewood, and moves his limbs gingerly against the grit of the sand. 

Eduardo looks over eventually and snorts with laughter.

“I told you,” he says. “You look like a tomato wearing a shirt.”

Mark presses delicate fingertips into the space around his collar, feeling the heat in his face and on his forearms and the backs of his hands and the tops of his feet, wincing. “I hate you,” he tells Eduardo. Eduardo only smiles grimly, a _there is nothing you can say that will not make you the loser in this situation_ kind of face. Then he leans over, his torso extending in a long line, and digs through his suitcase before pulling out another tube and tossing it at Mark. Mark catches it. Moisturizer.

“Thanks,” he mutters. Eduardo just smiles smugly down at the sand.

 

The heavens open in the late afternoon in a downpour of brief but epic proportions, the sky roiling in on itself within the space of minutes and the raindrops starting out big and spattering and quickly turning into thick, soaking sheets. It feels so good on Mark’s burned skin that he can’t even be bothered to drag himself back up toward the shelter of the tree canopy, where everyone else has huddled, or else beneath the few tarps and sheltering pieces of metal that have been set up down the beach. 

“Mark!” Eduardo calls through the rain. Mark ignores him. The ocean has greyed in the sudden storm, and he stares out at it for a moment, blinking against the water streaming down over his forehead, before tipping his head back, squeezing his eyes shut and just letting himself be soaked, letting the rain white out everything else. 

It abates as suddenly as it came, and he frowns to suddenly feel the raindrops slow against his skin and then stop altogether, the heat of the sun rushing back in. He opens his eyes and looks around. The beach is still there, and the remains of the plane, and the survivors, edging tentatively back out from the shelter of the trees. And the sea, calming now, as clear and tropical as it ever was. 

The realization comes then, softer and far less afraid than he’d thought it would when he tried to imagine it the day before: that they’re here, really here, that this place is real and so is he.

He turns around. Eduardo is standing a ways back, a stark little picture dressed in black and white with his sun-warmed skin against the shivering wet green of the jungle. He’s watching Mark with his hands in the pockets of his slacks. 

“Communing with nature?” he asks wryly.

“Yeah,” Mark says, because it’s not entirely false, anyway. 

“Would you like a towel?”

“Do we have towels?”

“No.”

“I don’t want one anyway.”

Eduardo smiles, just a little, one corner of his mouth tugging up. “Good,” he says, and leaves Mark to air dry in the salty petrichor of the beach. 

 

The sun is starting to sink that day when Eduardo comes back with fruit, apparently found just inside the jungle. “It’s a good sign,” he tells Mark, “it means there must be plenty more further in.” 

Mark picks at the peel of what turns out to be a mango. “I wish I could do something.” His voice is a bit more petulant than he’d like it to be. 

“It’s okay,” Eduardo says. “No one expects you to help.” He nods vaguely at Mark’s leg, still in its splint. 

“No, I mean I’m bored,” Mark says.

“Oh.” Eduardo blinks. “Right.” He looks sideways at Mark, and Mark recognizes it as a depositions face and steels himself. “Should have known you weren’t apologizing for being useless.” 

Mark doesn’t dignify it with a response, just holds Eduardo’s gaze, flat, until Eduardo blinks and looks away, sighing shortly. 

“You could work on your tan,” he suggests, deadpan, and Mark has to resist the urge to throw sand in his face.

“Did you happen to find a pair of crutches in any of the stuff today?” he asks instead. Eduardo shakes his head, and Mark nods, jaw set. “Okay. I’ll make one.”

Eduardo quirks an eyebrow. “With what?”

“Wood,” Mark says firmly. “And… vines.”

Eduardo snorts. “Vines.”

“Yes.” 

“Doesn’t this all just…” he sighs, looking out at the ocean, tinged orange by the sunset. “It just feels so fake, you know?” His voice softens a little. 

“I guess.” 

“I really didn’t think we’d still be here by now,” Eduardo says, almost like it’s to himself. Mark winces involuntarily, hearing his voice get that way, but he doesn’t say anything. 

They lapse into more pensive staring at the ocean – it seems that this is how all silences get filled on the island, and it’s not altogether uncomfortable – before Mark asks, low, “So what were you doing in Sydney?”

Eduardo looks around at him, a bit startled. “Business,” he says, shrugging like it’s not worth explaining further. “You?”

“Same,” Mark says, because for Eduardo purposes, it’s probably the safest way of putting it. “And business in LA, too?”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says. He huffs out a little laugh. “I was supposed to be on a flight back to Miami by now. I just had one meeting, and then I was going to see my family.”

His voice is kind of tight. 

“I’m sure they’re looking for us, Wardo,” Mark murmurs. 

Eduardo nods, closing his eyes. “I know.”

Mark looks at him, and thinks that every time it doesn’t seem possible for Eduardo’s face to hurt him more, it just does. Maybe a product of such long separation, like a tolerance break. It doesn’t make it any easier to look at him all pained and haunted, though, and that not even directed at Mark for once, on top of everything. The sight tugs a little at the old half-guilt buried inside him. 

“Did you talk to anyone else?” he asks, just to say anything. He gestures vaguely down the beach at the other survivors sitting in clumps on pieces of driftwood and on top of suitcases, fires starting up as the twilight gathers. 

“Some people,” Eduardo says, shrugging. He chews on his lip. “They mostly want to know about you,” he says begrudgingly after a moment. 

Mark rolls his eyes, and Eduardo fixes him with a hard look. 

“Modesty doesn’t suit you,” he says, voice going all gravelly. Mark’s eyes tick down automatically. 

“It’s whatever,” he mutters. “Not like my skill set is going to come in very handy here.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says with a twist of his mouth, “but when the time comes to hack the island’s network, we’ll know who to call.”

Mark smirks, and then they’re both just looking at each other, silence sinking around them like shelter, and all at once it’s frighteningly companionable – not perfect, not easy, but entirely better than nothing.

“I’m really glad you’re here, Wardo,” Mark says, because it seems to him that there’s a time and a place for pretense, for dishonesty, and this is far from it. And he’s not as young as he once was. He’s able to say certain things out loud, when they are true, and necessary. 

Eduardo’s face goes all soft and confusing, a face Mark has never really understood but that he’s starting to think of as its own emotional category, a _Wardo_ category, something just outside of classification. 

“You too, Mark,” he says softly. 

Mark watches as he starts to build a fire.

 

He wakes up in the morning to find a pile of bamboo and wood pieces and a tangle of vines like a nest of snakes sitting next to him, as though Santa (or Hanukkah Harry, as the case may be) had come in the night. Eduardo is nearby, peeling a mango with what appears to be a razor blade embedded in the end of a piece of wood. 

“Did you make a knife?” Mark asks, shocked. 

Eduardo looks up. “Good morning.” He resumes his peeling. “Kind of. I just took apart one of my spare blades for my razor.” 

“With what?”

“Eyeglass repair kit. They found a couple in people’s luggage.” 

Mark blinks, and Eduardo chuckles a little. 

“What?” he asks.

“Just enterprising, is all,” Mark hedges. The makeshift knife doesn’t actually seem to be working great, but it’s better than having no knife, and it’s probably a little too early in the day to be antagonizing Eduardo over needlessly petty matters, anyway. 

“One of the many survival skills I learned in the Brazilian wilderness as a child,” Eduardo says mildly. It surprises a laugh out of Mark. The sound feels good, shaking out of his chest. 

“Anyway, let’s see what you got.” Eduardo indicates the wood and the vines. “Crutch away.”

It shouldn’t be too hard to one-up a razor stuck in the end of a stick, but Mark takes his time anyway, drawing a schematic in the sand (and finding it surprisingly hard to recall the shape of a crutch from memory) and taking inventory of his supplies. Eduardo had done a good job finding him things, and he’s grateful, though he doesn’t say anything.

It’s incredibly good to work with his hands, to do anything besides stare vacuously out at the ocean. He thinks back to watching Erica build things with the BU women’s robotics club, remembering how it didn’t seem that different from coding, only the product of all the moving pieces you put together was something you could hold, in the end, rather than just see on a screen. Still, there’s a certain level of instant gratification that comes from having a project take recognizable shape right in front of your eyes out of nothing, faster even than a wireframe comes into being. It’s familiar, and distracting, and he loses himself in it. 

He’s got the basic frameworks lashed together by the time Eduardo has the mango chopped up and spread out on a wide, shiny leaf for a plate, and by the time they’ve eaten it all, the things exist. He wraps the top bars, the parts that go under his arms, in the torn remainder of the shirt Eduardo had used to bandage Mark’s leg, graciously donated to the cause.

He tests the joints, tugging. The crutches don’t fall apart. They even kind of look like crutches. 

“Help me up.”

Eduardo stands, brushing the sand off his pants in a habitual motion that Mark still thinks looks funny, considering that they are still on the beach and they are not going to stop being on the beach any time soon, and pulls Mark to his feet. Mark wobbles on one leg for a moment, tipping his weight into Eduardo’s side as he gets his balance. Eduardo brackets an arm around his shoulders, steadying him, and Mark tries very hard not to think about how undeniably good it feels to be _held_ by someone, for lack of a better word. He’s never been a hugger, but a situation like this does seem to have awoken certain primal needs for comfort, even in him. 

Luckily, he doesn’t need to stoop so low as asking Eduardo to keep his arm around him (not that he would anyway, but still), because Eduardo seems reluctant to let go even once Mark’s got the crutches braced against his sides. 

“Are you sure about this?” he asks, watching Mark poke the ends of the things into the sand. 

“Better than nothing.” He hops a little, bending the knee of his injured leg so his toes skim the beach. “You can let go,” he says pointedly, and Eduardo steps back immediately, chewing on his lower lip. 

Mark takes one ungainly step, and then swings forward inside the bracket of the crutches to take another. They don’t go to pieces, and he doesn’t face-plant in the sand, and his leg doesn’t fall off. It’s about as good as he could have hoped. He grins crookedly at Eduardo.

“Want to go for a walk?”

The flush of success, of course, evaporates the moment they get over to where most of the other survivors are grouped, a little ways down the beach. A woman is on her knees in the center of the group, crying over a body covered in a blanket. 

“The guy with the leg,” one of the others – the fat guy – mutters to Eduardo as they all stand there, helpless witnesses. “That’s his wife. He died, last night, I guess.” 

“Oh,” Eduardo says, throat working as he swallows thickly. The other guy peers around him to look at Mark, but Mark can’t take his eyes off the body. There’s only one foot sticking out from the end of the blanket. 

_That could have been me,_ he thinks, and he’s suddenly, sickeningly aware of how lucky they all are to be alive. The odds have got to be astronomical. He remembers the program he’d tried to think through on the day of the crash, and his stomach churns.

This awareness continues into the night: they pile the dead in the fuselage after sundown and burn it, worried that the bodies will attract unwelcome predatory visitors from deeper in the jungle. The little blonde pregnant girl – Eduardo says her name is Claire – stands in front of the blaze in the black night reading the names aloud from the manifest, saying inane little facts about all of them, whatever she could glean from the things in their pockets and luggage. He was a dentist. She was an organ donor. These two were engaged to be married. 

Mark stands on his crutches near the back of the crowd with Eduardo, watching the fire roar skyward, and thinks about Facebook, about names and friends and relationship statuses. He averts his eyes from the burning husk of the plane.

Eduardo shifts next to him, his arm brushing Mark’s as he hunches in on himself against the heat of the fire and maybe other things. Mark tries to catalogue the few people in his life who would miss him if they thought he was dead – who are missing him, maybe, right at that moment. He wonders if Eduardo would have been one of them. It seems pointless to ask, though, seeing as he’s here. 

 

   
The crutches are more empowering than Mark had expected them to be, not to mention alleviating some of the anxiousness that comes with being stuck on his ass when God knows what all could come crashing out of the jungle at any second. He spends the days motoring around almost happily, getting to know all the little nearby corners of the beach that he’d only been able to look out at from their secluded little campsite before.

Mostly he ends up standing in the ocean, holding his foot gingerly above the surf, staring out at the horizon in the blazing sun. He’s permanently half-red now, his skin glowing pink in the approximation of a tan, or the closest someone of his complexion is going to come to one, anyway. Eduardo keeps making him put on sunblock, but Mark knows they’re going to run out sooner or later, so he’s trying to wean off. 

He’s growing to like the permanent feel of salt on his skin, rough and sweat-worn, caked on all dusty and sanded-down. He likes the way the ocean makes him feel heavy, dripping onto the sand like something newly born. He likes the bright sting of sweat and salt in the corners of his eyes, the way his hair tangles in loose, coarse knots and waves and spirals now, catching against his fingers.

He likes standing in the water with the waves cool and constant around the ankle of his one good leg, all white noise around him, staring out at the edge of the world with his hands still on the crossbeams of his crutches and unsure what he’s searching for. 

He even kind of starts to like the taste of dirt on his food, strange as it sounds. A mango straight from the jungle, washed in the sea, is obviously fresher than the waxy, gene-modified kind you get at the grocery store - but there's something vital, deeper, about that bite of earth, turning rough against the backs of his teeth. It reminds Mark rather coarsely that he's alive. 

And there’s Eduardo, of course. It seems to Mark that there isn’t a place he goes in life where that isn’t the case – _and Eduardo, of course, always Eduardo_. Even when he was gone, he wasn’t really, always a ghostly weight on Mark’s shoulders. He’s corporeal, now, very much so, all soft sad smiles and pieces of fruit and gentle inquiries about how Mark’s leg is feeling today, and is he doing alright? And he tells him, always, yes, Wardo, I’m as fine as any of us. 

_I’m not fine, but neither are you_ , he thinks as he watches Eduardo stare out at the ocean with badly masked anxiety, as they are all so prone to doing. _But we’re surviving._

And the nights – the nights on the island, when not disrupted by any frightening thing from the snap of a twig to the sonorous crashing of the unknown monster, are so quiet that Mark feels at times as though he can't place himself in space, as though he's floating, adrift in a cocoon of silent darkness, punctuated by the occasional tree frog call. On the fourth night the sky is so utterly clear that he sees the Milky Way, for the first time in his life. He lies on his back, Eduardo a quiet constancy of soft movement nearby, and his breath goes tight in his chest.

“Wardo,” he whispers, “look at this.”

Eduardo looks around.

“What?”

“You can see the galaxy.”

Eduardo turns and looks up at the sky, and then settles on his back a few feet away, fingers interlaced atop his stomach. 

They look in silence for a long while, the faint swath of distant worlds dusted across the night, silver-grey on purple on black.

The tide rolls in, then out, then in again, like breathing. Mark has never felt smaller, or, somehow, more vitally aware that he exists.

When he manages to pull his eyes away from the sight, he turns his head to find Eduardo looking at him, rather than at the sky. Mark meets his eyes for a moment, and neither of them says anything. Mark finds he doesn’t really have the words for this, anyway. 

 

The days blur together as the first week wanes, and still there is no rescue. The mechanical noise of the monster – they’re calling it that, for lack of a better idea – comes again on the fifth night, crashing through the jungle in the foothills. The next morning, someone drowns in the ocean just going for a swim. People are starting to get restless, the fear taking over, and fights break out with increasing regularity over hoarded supplies and who’s in charge and of what. 

Mark watches it all rather dispassionately, because it seems so very cliché to lose your humanity in a situation like this, to fall apart – but he’s still glad he has Eduardo as a mediator. The others seem reticent to talk to Mark directly or involve him in their problems. Maybe because he’s injured; maybe because he’s him.

He can appreciate, too, the fact that he and Eduardo have not done this – how, in the face of utter disaster, everything comes back to center. Eduardo could be acting as though the circumstances of their reunion don’t change anything, as though he still hated Mark and doesn't forgive him, because maybe he does, and doesn't. But it’s plain enough to both of them that isn’t going to help anyone survive. 

(Of course, the old things do still matter, the grudges, the wounds and scars from _before_ , if only insofar as they give the two of them some common ground in a place where everyone is starting over. And it isn’t perfect, and Eduardo still looks at him the way he did during the depositions, sometimes, in a way that makes Mark’s gut twist, that thrills sick and angry through his skin. It’s strange, this limbo, being asked to put it all aside and yet to bear the burden of it, to try to find a balance between long separation and irreconcilable differences and the fact that none of that is going to help them survive. 

But Mark likes the idea of the tabula rasa. He thinks that if Eduardo would let him, he'd like to wipe the slate clean.) 

And then, a week after the crash, they find the caves. 

It’s the night of the day the woman drowns, with sundries running thin and patience thinner, when Jack comes out of the jungle all disheveled and out of breath and tells them that he found fresh water. 

Mark stands up to listen to him talk, hardly moving when Eduardo appears at his elbow out of nowhere, silent as a ghost and about as frightened pale in the flickering orange torchlight. 

“We’re all still waiting,” Jack says, “waiting for someone to come. What if they don’t? We have to stop waiting.”

He talks about organizing, about cooperating, figuring out how to survive as a group. Mark shifts next to Eduardo, looking down at the sand in the dark, and feels the weight of all this pressing down on his chest until it’s painful to breathe. 

Eduardo’s hand is at his back, then, the flat of his palm against Mark’s spine, side to side with Mark’s crutch the only space between them. Mark holds very still beneath the contact. He wonders if Eduardo is as scared, deep down, as he is. 

“Last week, most of us were strangers. But we’re all here now, and God knows how long we’re gonna be here,” Jack is saying. “But if we can’t live together – we’re gonna die alone.”

Mark looks at Eduardo, a reflexive movement, and finds Eduardo is looking at him too. The words sink between them like a fog. They stand there together for a long time, one tiny buoy of familiarity lost out to sea. 

A group goes into the valley in the morning to bring back water to the rest on the beach, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that that’s not going to be a sustainable way of doing things. Mark knows what comes next before they even start to talk about it.

Deciding whether to move to the caves or stay on the beach, of course, sparks an enormously overwrought sort of moral debate (many of the other survivors are prone to such conversations; maybe it’s the stripped-down setting that makes them want to get to the root of everything, or maybe it’s just that the people who happened to be on the plane are intensely philosophical). Mark ignores it, for the most part, sitting a ways off in the shade. Eduardo is nowhere to be seen. Fishing, maybe, or doing something in the water somewhere else. He seems to gravitate toward the ocean when nothing else is going on. Mark can’t blame him. All that blue exerts a certain eerie pull on the confines of the island itself, like the inexorable tug of the moon on the tides. 

In his head, Mark weighs their options. Stay on the beach, keep working for rescue, be there when it happens. Go to the caves, be sheltered, shaded, with easy access to fresh water and all the food the jungle offers. The jungle seems safer in ways, less exposed, but at the same time it’s where all the things that go bump in the night originate. Then again, water is their most pressing problem by far – and it’s not like they’ll miss the boat if rescue does come, only a short hike inland, as long as some people stay on the beach.

He’s made up his mind by the time Eduardo reappears, shirtless, with wet clothes slung over his arm. 

“Doing laundry?” Mark asks. Eduardo nods, slinging the clothes over the hunk of plane they’ve dragged over to their campsite, a macabre approximation of partitioning furniture.

“The saltwater makes it dry kind of stiff, but it’s better than nothing,” he says. 

Mark squints up at Eduardo’s bare chest against the backlight of the sun. “You are shockingly tan,” he tells him. “I didn’t think it was possible to be that tan.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the expert.” Eduardo grins down at him, all teeth, and Mark scowls. Eduardo’s ribs are visible, just, along with the faintest hint of toned muscle on his chest and abs. He’s been thin as long as Mark’s known him, but time has let him grow into his muscles more, filling out in a way Mark thinks probably won’t ever really happen to him. 

Even a week here has made all the survivors hardier, losing what wasn’t essential from their bodies. But Eduardo always was… well, nicer to look at than most people. Mark can admit that, objectively speaking. He averts his eyes anyway, and tries to pretend he doesn’t see the funny little twist to Eduardo’s mouth as he catches the line of Mark’s gaze.

“They’re talking about moving in to the caves,” Mark tells him now, as though he’s just recounting the baseball score from last night. “I don’t know, people think if we leave the beach we won’t be rescued.” 

Eduardo nods, biting his lip. “What do you think?”

“I think we should go.” Mark lifts his chin. “Sit down, I can’t see you up there.”

Eduardo drops obediently to his haunches in the sand, out of the direct sun, and Mark blinks to bring him into focus. Anxiety is scrawled all over his sun-warmed face.

“Doesn’t that feel like giving up?” he asks, his voice low and serious.

“It’s not like we won’t be rescued if we’re at the caves when they come.”

“You’re talking about splitting up.”

“People want to stay here anyway,” Mark says, shrugging. “Let them be the lookouts.”

“But – we’ve got no way of communicating, or—”

“We’ll figure it out.” Mark sets his jaw. “We have so far.”

Eduardo looks down the beach, still working his lower lip between his teeth. It takes Mark a couple of seconds to realize he’s mirroring the movement, eyes drawn to Eduardo’s mouth, and he shakes himself.

“We have to have water, Wardo,” he says, trying not to sound too plaintive.

“But they can bring it to us.”

“But why rely on anyone else?”

Eduardo sighs, scrubbing a salt-worn hand over his eyes. “Live together, die alone,” he comments bleakly, and Mark flicks his eyebrows in acknowledgement. 

“It just feels so permanent,” Eduardo hedges, “moving inland.”

“You can stay here,” Mark says. He’s shocked to hear the slight tremble in his own voice, completely involuntary. Eduardo looks over at him, eyebrows knit. 

“I’ll go wherever you go,” he says.

And Mark could say a lot of things to that, wants to say a lot of things, but in the end all he manages to get out is, “Why?”

Eduardo laughs softly. “I don’t wanna be on my own.”

It’s simple enough, and maybe for Eduardo it is the whole truth, though Mark knows if they were in each other’s shoes he’d be singing a different tune. He needs Eduardo with him to keep him sane, keep him grounded, the same exact way he’s needed him since the first day they met. And he’s afraid of the island in the dark, and of dying, and of what the future holds. 

But most of all he wants this. It’s an opportunity for something he’d given up even considering hoping for a long time ago. 

It seems that it would be a shame not to use all the undistracted time in the world to try and do the one thing that probably requires it. 

 

They give it a week in the end before heading inland, in the half-hearted hope that Mark’s leg will heal enough in the interval to make the hike a little easier. 

But the shocking part is – it actually works. 

“I don’t know,” Jack tells them when he’s poking at Mark’s splint and stitches six days later in the late afternoon. “Maybe I was wrong about the fracture.” He frowns. “Can you put weight on it?”

Mark tries, scrunching his face against the pain that shoots up from his ankle. He can do it, though not in a way that’s going to be terribly useful trekking through the woods. 

He feels Eduardo’s hand at his elbow and flinches away. “I’m fine,” he says through gritted teeth. 

When he looks up, it’s to find mild amusement on Jack’s face. Mark narrows his eyes at him, and after a moment Jack drops his gaze.

“Okay.” He directs himself to Eduardo. “Go a mile straight in from here, then stick to the creek around the cliff until it peters out, and just keep following the rocks. You’ll know when you’re there. I might catch up to you,” he glances at the beach, the people divvying up the water he’d ferried back, “but you should get going before it gets dark.” 

Eduardo turns to him when Jack has gone, speaking in an undertone. “You sure you want to go tonight? We could wait another—”

“No,” Mark snaps. “I’ve got cabin fever. …Beach fever. Whatever.”

Eduardo’s mouth twists to the side, dubious, but he shrugs. “Okay.” He hefts a backpack over his shoulder and helps Mark get his on around the crutches. 

“Maybe they’ll be like trekking poles,” he comments, squinting at them. He brushes the sand off the thighs of his jeans in the compulsive movement that never fails to make Mark’s mouth tick in a smile. “Let’s go.”

It’s the first time Mark’s ventured into the jungle, and it’s not as dense as he had expected – there’s still plenty of sky visible, and the air is clear and thin. What it is is green. Poisonous, neon green, like a crayon drawing from a coloring book. Mark’s eyes adjust within the first few minutes, and after that it’s Eduardo who looks unnatural, standing out stark golden and glimmering like an apparition in the muggy afternoon.

It’s actually easier to move on crutches over ground than it is through sand, and they navigate the undergrowth at a reasonable clip, not talking except to ask for the water or confer on directions. The air is taut in the short space between them, Eduardo leading and Mark following, and Mark could chalk it up to being afraid of being alone in the jungle, to the repressed fear that the tree-eating monster could come around a corner at any second, but he thinks it’s mostly that they’re afraid of being alone – really alone – with each other. 

He distracts himself with the new sights of the island’s interior. Far green clearings, sun-drenched and gently sloping – the aimless wend of the creek into the valley – jutting, angry cliffs, black rock, the smell of salt. All so outwardly tranquil that Mark’s inclination is not to trust it. But he feels marginally safer now that he’s able to run – or at the very least limp – away from whatever’s lurking in hills. 

They make a valiant effort, but the twilight catches up to them a couple of miles in. 

“We should camp,” Eduardo says, chewing around the words as they all do with such foreign phrases, “I guess.”

Mark nods, even though Eduardo’s not looking at him. His leg is not a leg anymore, but a vague static cloud of pain extending somewhere below his hips. He drops his pack on the ground and settles clumsily down next to it, stretching out and wincing. 

Eduardo builds a fire while Mark fiddles with his crutches. They talk a little bit about the time, about the fact that the second week passed alarmingly quicker than the first, and about whether Claire might be due soon. But it’s stilted, almost forced, and when the conversation dies out they just sit there avoiding one another’s eyes in the flickering light. The totality of Eduardo’s presence feels more absolute than ever in the dark and the utter quiet, no groups of survivors conversing down the beach.

The shadows of Eduardo’s eyelashes are spider-fine brushstrokes painted down across the arches of his cheekbones, shivering in the orange firelight. Mark can’t stop staring at them, feels his eyes keep dragging back to them against his will, and he flushes and turns away when Eduardo’s eyes catch his. 

“Your leg,” Eduardo says, a pointed change of subject, “that healed freakily fast, didn’t it?”

“It’s not all the way better.”

“Still, without a cast… that should be taking weeks and weeks to get to where you are.”

Mark shrugs. He doesn’t mention the guy in the wheelchair who he remembers from the plane, an old bald dude named John who’s now cavorting around the island hunting boar and scaling cliffs without so much as batting an eyelash. No one’s talking about it – either they don’t remember he ever was in the chair to begin with, or they’re choosing to forget. And the crash – the sheer number of them that survived, and with relatively minimal injuries – Mark’s thought it before, how it surely must defy statistics. 

He doesn’t know exactly what he thinks is the deal here, but still. There is, by and large, a lot of strange shit going down on this island.

He chooses not to voice any of this to Eduardo, but hedges finally, “This is a weird place.”

Eduardo nods. “Still can’t believe you’re here,” he murmurs, almost like it’s to himself. Mark stares at him, and watches him turn his face away into the shadows. 

It’s been two weeks. And though nor will he say this to Eduardo, he still can’t believe it – any of it – either.

The night is black and silence has fallen like a shroud around them again by the time the fire tails down, and Mark listens edgily to the rustlings of the jungle and the distant, possibly imagined rhythm of the tide. He looks across at Eduardo, who is looking across at him. They’re the only things holding each other to the ground. 

“We should get some sleep,” he says. 

“Okay,” Eduardo says, his voice soft and wispy. He doesn’t move or take his eyes off Mark for another long moment still, but Mark doesn’t say anything else as he settles down with his pack beneath his head, staring up into the whispering canopy of the trees. 

He still can’t quite wrap his mind around all the stars out here, twinkling from behind the silhouetted treetops: the brilliant clarity of the constellations tracking across the black sky, the whisper-light swath of the Milky Way behind them.

He still can’t quite wrap his mind around Eduardo, either, but that’s nothing new.

 

They head out at dawn and make it to the camp within an hour. Jack is there – he must have lapped them sometime last night – and a handful of others in various states of stasis. Claire, and the Korean couple who doesn’t speak English. The space is a tangled enclosure of brown rock, flanked a waterfall that spills into a clear, rocky pool, shaded by trees. It’s undeniably perfect shelter, and Mark thinks of the beach, the blank expanse of open ocean, and wonders how long it will take to call this home. 

In the close quarters, it’s much harder to ignore the way the core knot of the survivors are keeping secrets. Mark’s not a moron – he can recognize the closed-in body language and conspiratorial tones of people with things to hide. Quite possibly these particular secrets concern the monster. Mark thinks he might rather not know. 

He turns to Eduardo to comment on this fact, and finds Eduardo standing staring up at the overhanging rocks that form a ceiling around the edges of the cave, wringing his hands. 

Agitation about something, but Mark can’t glean what. Strange, how expressive, raw-open Eduardo is always the hardest to read. 

“Are you okay?” he asks reluctantly after a moment. Eduardo looks over at him sharply. 

“What?”

“What’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” Eduardo says, frowning at Mark, tilting his head. When no explanation for this look appears to be forthcoming, Mark raises his eyebrows, glancing around.

“Nothing,” Eduardo says again, softer. “It’s – weird to hear you ask that.”

Mark looks away. 

“I just…” Eduardo continues, dropping his pack in an unoccupied corner, “I’m just thinking about how we might be here for a while.”

“Yeah,” Mark says. The sound gets lost in the tightness in his throat. Being here in this small space with Eduardo is so vastly different from being on the beach. This is cohabitation. 

The sky darkens suddenly around midday, as it often does, and the rain comes in thick sheets that pound against the rocks outside the caves, visible like an impenetrable silver curtain through the gaps in the walls. 

Once, just for a second, Mark could swear he hears something else behind the downpour – a susurrus like voices – _whispers_ – indistinct and everywhere and gone as quickly as they came. He shivers. But no one else reacts to the sound, and Mark tries very hard to chalk it up to an auditory hallucination, a trick of the storm. File that with the monster, with his rapidly healing leg, with the improbability of all of this. 

He wonders absently and without much weight behind it whether they’re dead. It’s not the first time he’s thought of it, but it seems like there would have become more to it by now if it was true. 

On the other side of the space, the Korean woman is teaching Eduardo how to make a toothbrush out of an aloe leaf, in pantomime and bubbly, unintelligible fragments of her language. Mark watches absently. He’s begun recoding Facebook from the ground up in his mind to pass the time. He’d started last week, thinking he wouldn’t get farther than the framework of the profile page before they were off this rock, but he’s already made it to the news feed. It’s a hybrid of the original wireframes, practically archaic now at six years out of date, and the current incarnation, an amalgam of all his favorite parts. The Wall, the news feed, the masthead. 

He watches Eduardo rub the slimy green spike of aloe awkwardly across his top teeth, grinning at the Korean woman, who smiles encouragingly. They both laugh, and he touches her on the arm in the ubiquitous, unsolicited gesture of reassurance many of them have taken to offering each other. _We are both here,_ it tries to say, _and we’re alright_. 

There’s a tightness to Mark’s chest suddenly, and he looks away. In his mind, he jumps over to the masthead page and moves Eduardo’s name from the bottom of the list, a token position grudgingly given to him after the settlement, back to its original spot, right beneath Mark’s. 

 

There’s a tiny, weird, repressed part of Mark that starts to think that this is kind of nice, being here with Eduardo, in spite of all the fear and the unknowns. All they do is sit around together all day and talk a little and they’re almost _happy_ , when things aren’t scary. Having Eduardo again, and nothing else besides – it’s more than Mark had ever imagined he’d get back.

He voices this thought one afternoon a month (a _month_ ) after the crash, a quiet, unwilling admission.

“I feel like I wish we could just stay,” he murmurs. His throat is unexpectedly tight. “I mean, I don’t, but I do, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says quietly.

“But they’ll be looking for me.”

“And me.”

Mark looks at him questioningly before he realizes he shouldn’t. If Eduardo cares, it doesn’t show on his face.

“I’m, like, insured against kidnapping and stuff,” he says. “My father isn’t going to just sit around on an apparent plane crash.”

“It’s been a really long time,” Mark says. Eduardo shrugs, that way they have of selectively ignoring reality.

“Your father,” Mark says now, trying out the words in his mouth. “Is that – how is that?”

“It’s okay.” Eduardo shrugs again, and it has the same character as his shrug about the problems of their present situation. “It’s been a long time since – you know.”

A pause.

“So I do okay in Singapore,” Eduardo goes on finally, like he hadn’t said anything. “It could be worse.”

“That’s good,” Mark says. “I’m glad.”

Eduardo raises an eyebrow at him, half-smiling. “Thanks.” 

Mark shrugs.

Eduardo considers him for a moment. “What do you miss?” he asks finally.

Mark blinks.

“What?”

“I miss coffee. I would kill for even, like, shitty 7-Eleven coffee right now.”

Mark blinks at him, a crease forming between his eyebrows. 

“Mark,” Eduardo prompts after a moment, mouth quirking and not precisely in amusement. “I’m just making conversation.”

The tone is eminently familiar, sends a bright shard of something deep and sense-based in Mark’s memory through his chest, and for a moment he can’t figure out why. 

Then he realizes Eduardo’s delivery had been precisely that of Erica Albright when she had said a million years ago at the Thirsty Scholar, _Mark. I’m not speaking in code._  
  
It could have been yesterday, for all it was waiting just beneath the surface. Mark carries it with him, carries all of it, _you would do that for me?_ and _you have no idea what that’s going to mean to my father_ and _I was your only friend._ A secret penance. 

He wonders if Eduardo knows how often he thinks about him, how they were then, what happened. 

He doesn't know how to tell him that he's sorry for hurting him when he's not sorry, Facebook-wise, for his reasons. 

“Okay,” Eduardo drags out, confused and annoyed, just when Mark is realizing that the pause has stretched too long. 

“I miss my laptop,” Mark half-blurts, just to say anything. Of course, it’s so obvious as to hardly merit mention, and Eduardo huffs out a half-laugh through his nose, a little burst of exasperated mirth. Mark shrugs, not looking at him, concentrating instead on tamping down all the things that just welled up inside him. They’re manifesting as a tightness in his throat, which is, to say the least, obnoxious. 

 

Claire wakes screaming that night, hysterical, saying someone had come into the caves and tried to hurt her baby. It’s dismissed as a dream, but everyone is still uneasy, perhaps too much so. Mark wonders, yet again, what some of the other survivors seem to know that the rest of them don’t. 

Almost no one says a word all night, long after Claire’s terrified sobbing in her lilting Australian accent subsides. Eduardo sits hunched and wide-eyed very close to Mark, not moving, staring at the ground. Mark doesn’t try to engage him, ignores the way their shoulders tremble together every so often, and he nods off with his head tipped back against the cave wall, half propped up. 

He wakes sometime much later, when the caves are quiet and dark save for the echoing night chorus of crickets and the weak, flickering light of dying fires. Eduardo has fallen asleep curled full against Mark, head on his shoulder, their sides flush together. His mouth is open, breath hot and damp through the fabric of Mark’s t-shirt. Mark stays very still. It’s the first time he’s seen Eduardo look peaceful since – long before they got here, actually, since Harvard. 

He’s not fully awake, so maybe that’s why he wants to shift his arm closer around Eduardo’s shoulders and nuzzle them together, but he doesn’t do it, because he’s afraid of what will happen if Eduardo wakes. So he breathes shallowly and lets himself fall back asleep with them still like that, together, able to find more comfort in the contact than fear in what it means. 

 

Eduardo jolts awake soon after first light and pulls away from Mark immediately, a drawing-in of limbs sluggish with sleep, his eyes blinking open and avoiding Mark’s face. Mark has been awake for a while, trying to pretend he isn’t listening to Eduardo breathing. 

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” Eduardo mutters only half intelligibly, rubbing a hand across his squinting eyes, his mouth slow and raspy. Mark doesn’t know what he means by that, and so he doesn’t answer. Eduardo looks at him for a long moment once he’s fully awake, and Mark blinks back at him, waiting to be spoken to. 

Finally Eduardo shakes his head and drags himself to his feet with a hand scraping along the rock wall of the cave. He wanders off, and Mark wonders if all that meant Eduardo’s feeling the same thing he’s feeling, like he’s all tensed up inside of something made of threads of glass and if he moves a muscle they’ll shatter and he’s not sure if he’s ready for – if he even understands – where that will leave him. 

The thought weighs on him all day, distracting him from all the vague jungle nothing with which he’s occupying himself, dragging his eyes across to Eduardo whenever he lets his guard down. 

It’s just – this is _easy_ , is what this thing with the two of them is, if Mark’s being perfectly honest with himself. It’s hard, too, and frightening, and unlike anything he’d ever prepared himself for dealing with. But then again, so is all of this, and yet – it is. They’re surviving, and what’s more, they’re surviving each other’s company. 

Eduardo visits the beach that week, helping ferry water back and forth, and reports to Mark that the signal fire is still going strong. But the remaining survivors there don’t seem as prone to gravitating toward it as they had a week or two ago, he says, frightened moths to a flame in want of hope.

“It’s not that they’re resigned, exactly,” he tells Mark, frowning. “Just…” 

After a moment of struggling for words he breaks off, shrugging. Mark thinks he gets it, though. What can they do, but just get through each day?

“Do you think we’re gonna die here?” Eduardo asks abruptly. His tone is so frank that Mark is almost alarmed. 

“I don’t know,” he says. Eduardo looks down, eyes round and full of anxiety, and Mark hates to see him like that, can hardly bear to see him like that. He’s never known what to say, and even now – especially now – it’s no different.

It’s a long time later that he asks, “Do you remember what I told you on the day of the crash?”

Eduardo is propped against the wall, digging around aimlessly in the backpack he’s adopted. He looks up. 

“What?”

He sounds like he isn’t sure he heard Mark right, and there’s something else there – tremulous, his eyes shining slightly, and Mark bites down on the inside of his lip.

“Do you remember what I said to you,” Mark asks again, low, “on the beach.”

Eduardo looks at him for a long time before he speaks. “You said, ‘it’s gonna be okay.’” His voice is very small.

“I still mean it,” Mark says, swallowing, meeting Eduardo’s eyes. “Even if …even if we don’t know.” 

“Why are you—”

“Because – it’s all I can tell you,” Mark says, trying to put a lot of unsaid things into it, things he barely understands himself. 

Eduardo stares at him, and there’s something building behind the gaze, almost like panic welling up. Mark shrugs, and finally he looks away, his heart thudding with painful intensity in his chest.

Eduardo doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the night. 

 

Mark’s leg is nearly better. It’s been a miraculously short recovery, frankly unnatural, but Mark’s trying not to look a gift horse in the mouth. As the sixth week dawns, he manages to get up and around sans crutches quite a lot, like physical therapy, and it helps. 

He’s got plenty of free time, even by island standards. This is due to the fact that Eduardo has stopped speaking to him. 

Not a hundred percent, but it’s an obvious change, a clear passive-aggressive Eduardo tactic that means he’s mad at Mark about something. Mark has absolutely no idea what it could be. He hasn’t done anything. What is there to do? 

He’d like to go exploring, but he gets edgy off by himself on the island, even though it’s been almost two weeks since they heard the monster, and the whispers never came back. And this is a lonely place when you have no one to talk to. There are times when Mark would choose the solitude, but the fact that Eduardo’s choosing it for him makes him averse. 

Even when Eduardo’s there he feels, suddenly, as though he’s not. Mark tries to make conversation, even, stilted and absurd, but Eduardo just looks pained and answers in monosyllables, avoiding Mark’s eye, a muscle jumping in his jaw. 

“Wardo,” he says to him finally, on a humid afternoon by the waterfall, the blue sky choked with roiling white clouds. “Can you at least talk to me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Eduardo is filling up an Oceanic-label water bottle, several more empty ones in the pack by his feet. His voice is flat and he doesn’t look at Mark.

“Just – I don’t understand what you’re mad about.”

“I’m not.”

Mark rolls his eyes, even though Eduardo isn’t looking at him. “Okay.”

He waits, and soon enough Eduardo straightens up, tense in the shoulders, fingers crunching tight into the plastic bottle in his hand. 

“What are we doing, though, Mark?” 

“'What are we _doing_?” Mark repeats cautiously, eyebrows dropping. Eduardo looks away, growing quickly agitated, all distressed potential energy through his body like he wants to explode and is quite possibly working up to doing so. 

“Acting like –” he starts, then grits his teeth, meeting Mark’s eyes with sudden dark intensity, and Mark feels a little thrill of nerves run down his arms. “ _Pretending_ like everything’s okay, I mean, with each other, like none of it happened,” and his voice cracks, “like we’re suddenly just fine because of this fucking plane crash?” 

Mark blinks, stunned. 

“I don’t forgive you,” Eduardo says suddenly.

It feels like a slap across the face. Mark is as speechless as he’s ever been in his life. He doesn’t know what he’d expected to hear next. Anything else. Not that.

“So what is this?” Eduardo goes on, voice rising in pitch a little. 

“I don’t know,” Mark says, hearing how the words come out snappish and not caring. “What do you want to do, sit here not speaking? Act like it’s five years ago? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a little bit of an exceptional situation here—”

“Oh, and so that’s an excuse?"

“No!” 

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Mark says shortly. His heart is thumping painfully in his chest. Eduardo just shakes his head, and the anger sparks again, hot and bright. “No, really. You tell me. You tell me how you think we should be acting.”

Overhead, the clouds are gathering in, blocking the sun.

“Forget it,” Eduardo bites out. He drops his water bottle into the pack.

“God, it doesn’t matter, not now. None of it.”

“Of _course_ it fucking matters,” Eduardo practically shouts, hoarse-voiced. 

“Wardo, we—” _need each other_ , _I need you, please don’t leave me here alone._ “We’re all we have,” Mark manages finally, each syllable a desperate grinding stress. 

Eduardo looks away, his jaw clenched visibly tight. 

“Don’t do this just because you think you should,” Mark says.

Eduardo’s eyes snap up to his, the same churning black as the waterfall beside them under the stormy sky. 

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says, voice level and low. Then he turns and disappears into the jungle before Mark can even think to stop him, an angry flash of dark hair and golden skin through the greenery wet and heavy like a curtain.

“Wardo,” Mark half-calls abortively after him. He glares for a minute or so at the spot in the trees where Eduardo had gone out of sight. 

“God fucking dammit,” he mutters finally, and he starts after him, leaving the water bottles – someone will come for them eventually. He's hardly even hobbling now, almost okay again, and the weak pain that sparks up his calf when he sets off is muted by the adrenaline still pumping through his brain, the way he's winded like he's been running, heart pounding behind his eyes. 

He twists through the trees and follows the trail of broken branches and crushed flora that probably belongs to Eduardo – neither of them have a flair for tracking like some of the others, because Eduardo lacks the eye for detail and Mark lacks the patience – but even if this was here before, Eduardo is likely to have followed it, and anyway it's the only option Mark's got. 

It's mid-afternoon but the sky is still darkening, and within 10 minutes in the thick of the jungle the temperature must drop 15 degrees. Rain coming, and he still hasn't caught up to Eduardo. He doesn't know what he's going to say when he does. _I know you hate me for cutting you out of my company six years ago and for us not turning out the way you hoped we would and that having me here is hard for you and it's not that I blame you for being angry about all that but if we could maybe put it aside until we get off the haunted fucking island where our plane crashed six weeks ago it might be more convenient for everyone, don't you think?_

_Because you’re all I’ve got here, and I can’t do this on my own, and I need you not to hate me._

Well. Something like that. 

He comes to a halt at the edge of a clearing a mile or two from the caves and spots Eduardo with his back turned on the other side of it, finally, at the exact same moment as the sky opens up and it starts to pour, a peal of thunder rolling through the air like an earthquake. Right now, with every fiber of his being, Mark hates the goddamn jungle. He's moving to Arizona if they ever get home. 

“Wardo!” he yells, water streaming over his face into his mouth. It's hard to even hear himself over the noise of the downpour shaking the tall grass, but Eduardo turns anyway. 

He looks – really bad, as torn apart as Mark has ever seen him. Hair plastered to his forehead, eyes pitch-dark and thunder-clouded. There's a blotchy flush high on his cheekbones, his hands balled in useless fists at his sides. 

“ _What_ ,” he yells back. His voice croaks horribly, like a sob. Mark's jaw clenches. 

“I’m sorry, okay?” He blinks against the soaking rain. 

Eduardo laughs, a shudder through his shoulders. “Don’t say things you can’t take back, Mark.” 

“Would you just—” Mark takes a feckless step forward into the clearing and then stops again, frustrated. “Just come over here, I don’t want to keep yelling!”

Eduardo glares at him, and Mark physically bites back the urge to say _don’t be a child_ , squinting through the rain. 

“Fine,” he yells finally, when Eduardo hasn't budged, “here,” and he takes one deliberate step, then another, a concession: _there, I made the first move, now fucking come over here and talk this out with me if you’re so mad._ Eduardo watches him for a few seconds and then finally moves too, mirroring Mark, his body unreadable. It’s hard to push forward through the tall grass, waterlogged and razor-edged, but they both do it, cutting a swath in toward each other with their bodies. 

Mark feels kind of ridiculous by the time they meet in the middle. It felt like a long walk, though it wasn’t at all, the slow-motion prelude into something long-awaited. A gun duel. Or something else.

They stop in front of each other. Then, with no warning, Eduardo grabs him by the front of his shirt, hauls him in and kisses him hard on his open mouth. 

It’s messy and the angle is all wrong and there’s rain everywhere, Eduardo’s tongue against his teeth and his hand fisted at Mark’s collar, and Mark’s arms are shocked stiff at his sides, and then he grabs Eduardo by the upper arms and tries to get closer, sudden and desperate, grappling with him. They stumble on the high trampled grass and fall, and Mark is distantly aware of the pain sparking through his leg at the bodily impact but he doesn’t care. Eduardo is half on top of him, kissing him desperately, like if he stops this will all become real again and he doesn’t want to face it, though it feels very real to Mark, Eduardo’s hands on him, one skating down over his chest, rucking up his shirt to grip at the concave space of his ribcage above his waist, the other clutching at the side of his face. 

Mark feels the goosebumps on the cold, wet skin of Eduardo’s lower back where his shirt is riding up, and he holds them tight together and kisses back, kisses him until he can’t breathe and the feel of Eduardo’s body has eclipsed even the rain, because he can’t imagine in that moment doing anything else. 

It feels like forever before Eduardo pulls back, sudden and gasping, half-falling off of Mark and getting some distance between them with a frightened kind of inertia. He ends up sitting, knees akimbo, a few feet away, his cheeks deeply flushed and his eyes dark and wet. 

Mark collapses onto his back, panting, blinking at the sky. It’s still cloud-stricken and rain is falling onto his face and the exposed skin of his belly, but it’s lessening slightly, as quickly as it came. How poetic. 

Eduardo draws his knees up to his chest, hunched, and looks over at Mark. They stare at each other, and the question must be on Mark’s face, because after a moment Eduardo goes, quietly, “I’ve wanted to do that for a very long time.” 

“Wardo,” Mark breathes. It’s a singular comprehension in his brain, leaving no room for anything else. Like it’s the only word he knows. 

Eduardo just closes his eyes and presses his forehead into his knees.

Mark looks over at him again, and he can see every trembling line and angle of his body through his soaking clothes, the knotted muscles of his back, the fragile peaks of his bones, and – Eduardo had kissed him, and he’s so _sad_ , and – and they love each other. Mark realizes it so suddenly it’s like being punched in the stomach. If there was ever someone he could say it about. It would be Eduardo. It is Eduardo. It always has been. 

It takes him a second to notice that Eduardo is standing up, shaking his hair out of his eyes with one hand.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is completely gutted, dull and hollow. “I’ll leave you alone.” And he sets off back toward the beach. 

“Wardo—” Mark starts again, sitting up, but he doesn’t know what he _can_ say, doesn’t know how to do this, and then Eduardo has disappeared.

Mark knows he should run after him. But they’re on an island, after all. Eduardo won’t go far. 

 

He finds him down at the beach in the end, sitting alone and staring out at the ocean. Mark sits down next to him, keeping his distance, not talking. The sand seems to leap up to cling to his damp clothes like dryer lint.

Eduardo’s shaking his head a little, apparently following the thread of his own internal monologue. Then he laughs, a humorless cough of a sound. 

“You have no idea what this is like,” he says, low and hoarse.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mark snaps, but it’s quiet, and Eduardo ignores him, or else he didn’t hear. 

“I was – this was over,” he says, pained, “and....” He sighs. “This is just some kind of cosmic joke, I guess. That’s what it feels like.” The tense sort of anger in his voice tails off as he speaks, and then he just sounds tired. 

“You mean us,” Mark says. It’s not a question. 

Eduardo laughs again. Mark wishes he would stop doing that; it hurts to hear. “Yeah. Us.” 

A pause, then he says, “I never, I mean – I guess I never really stopped hoping. I thought I had, but now I know I didn’t.”

“For what?”

Eduardo looks at him, slightly incredulous. “For – I don’t know, Mark, for...” he sighs again and looks back at the water. “For it not to have happened,” he murmurs, barely audible. “For it to... be fixed.” 

“I’m sorry,” Mark says softly, honestly without intent, just because it’s the first thing that comes out when he opens his mouth. He swallows.

“What?” Eduardo turns to look at him again. 

Mark licks his lips. “I’m sorry for putting you through it. I wish... that things could have been different.”

“What?” Eduardo says again. He’s staring. Mark doesn’t say anything, looking down at his own feet in the sand. His heart is thumping rapidly. 

“But, but that's all I can do, Wardo,” he says finally, looking up at him, trying harder than he ever has to keep eye contact. Eduardo has to understand. He has to. “It _happened_ , you know, and I can't go back in time, I, I just—” He takes a quick breath, a sudden little gasp. 

“If we could just go from here,” he says finally. “I don't know. I don't know what you want. But that's what I want.”

There are tears on Eduardo's cheeks, he realizes then, and he really can't deal with that, so in a quick compulsive movement, he leans in and kisses him. 

Eduardo makes a choked little noise, keening helplessly into it, and Mark brushes a thumb over his cheek, cupping the side of his face in his palm until the tears are gone. Eduardo’s lips move against his, chapped from so much sun and salt, and Mark's chest is tight like a furled fist, and he feels Eduardo try to pull back and holds him fast, biting softly at his lower lip until Eduardo gives a little whimper, his whole body slumping against Mark's. 

When they pull apart Eduardo just leans into him for a moment, forehead against his shoulder. Mark holds him. He doesn't feel as uncertain as he'd thought he would. He takes this as a good sign. 

“God dammit,” Eduardo murmurs finally, not making any move to disentangle himself from Mark. “You're so –” His body gives a little clench, one fleeting folding-in of frustration. _“God_ , Mark, it's so easy, isn't it, just tell me you want to start over and, and kiss me, and that's all it takes, isn't it, just –”

“Isn't it?” Mark interjects softly. He's really asking. “Tell me,” he adds, husky with the effort of saying it, “tell me what else and I'll do it, Wardo. Anything.” His voice breaks and he stops, embarrassed. 

Eduardo pulls back finally, looking at Mark with round, red-rimmed eyes. 

“It took being stranded on a desert island.” He gives a little hiccupping laugh. “For you... for this.”

“I think I'd call it a tropical island,” Mark says, mouth twisting up. 

“The beach is sand.”

“I hope you won't hold that against me,” Mark adds quietly. “The first thing.”

Eduardo sighs and scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I'm trying not to,” he says, and there's such frank gratitude on his face when he looks at Mark that Mark has to look away. He doesn't deserve anything like that look. 

“Do you want to go back to camp?” he asks after a while.

Eduardo’s still looking at him, has been looking at him off and on. “No,” he says, and he leans in and kisses Mark again, pushing down into him until he falls back into the sand, Eduardo half on top of him, their chests pressed flush together. It’s a different kiss, deeper and turning quickly breathless, like Eduardo is testing this, trying to see if Mark really meant it. Mark wraps an arm around Eduardo’s shoulders and buries his other hand in his hair. He tries to show him that he did. 

 

Night has fallen by the time they even think about maybe heading back into the jungle, so they sleep on the beach together. Many weeks ago Mark might have been a little scared to be on their own like this, no fire, no shelter, but just now he can’t manage to do it. Because the things they don’t know or understand don’t matter anymore, at least not for the moment.

This close, he can see that Eduardo is freckling from too much sun, little olive-colored smatterings across his golden skin. There are millions of stars in the sky here, but right now, Mark would rather map the constellations on Eduardo's skin.

Eduardo sighs, half-awake, turning his face into the juncture of Mark’s shoulder. He still doesn’t look all the way happy, but then again, most of them rarely do here. 

Mark brushes his lips over Eduardo’s temple, drawing them into the sand, a tangle of warm limbs. He listens to the breathing hush of the ocean, feels the rise-fall of Eduardo’s chest against his, and for one contained, sparkling instant, he understands that this is the most incredibly beautiful miracle of coincidence – fate? – that has ever been, that of all the planes and all the people in the whole world, he would have ended up on one with Eduardo, and then – this, that they would have been given the chance to start over here on this beach. Their history is a palimpsest, footprints in the sand fading away beneath the tide.

And he knows Eduardo won’t let this solve all their problems, and that nothing can undo the past. But Mark thinks he can work with that. Not a blank slate, but a clean one.

 

They’re wending through the jungle the next morning, nearing the caves, when Eduardo freezes in front of him so suddenly that Mark walks into him.

“What?” he asks, annoyed, hopping to stay balanced on his bad leg. 

“Listen,” Eduardo whispers.

Mark listens. Jungle. Birds. 

A baby crying. 

“Jesus,” he says, looking at Eduardo in amazement. 

“Come on.”

They see it immediately when they appear on the fringes of the caves. Claire, looking incredibly tired, sitting in the center of a knot of cooing survivors and holding a blanketed bundle. 

“A baby,” Mark says dazedly. He looks over at Eduardo, but Eduardo isn’t there anymore. 

He’s crossed to the group standing around the new mom, and he smiles warmly at her, murmuring something. She lets him hold the baby, and he stands there with it in his arms like it’s the most natural thing in the world, staring down at its pinched little face, saying something quiet, all soothing elision. Portuguese, Mark realizes. The baby has stopped crying. It reaches up its tiny, wrinkled fist to grab at Eduardo’s collar. 

Eduardo puts the baby back in Claire’s arms and crosses back to Mark, looking sheepish. Mark just stares at him. His chest hurts a little, brimming over with sudden a sudden rush of emotion he doesn’t have a name for.

“That was gross,” he says. 

When Eduardo laughs, it’s like the sunrise.

 

_fin._


End file.
